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Poetry in English Language Literature UNIVERSIDADE ESTADUAL DO PIAUÍ - UESPI CENTRO DE CIÊNCIAS HUMANAS E LETRAS – CCHL CURSO: LICENCIATURA PLENA EM LETRAS INGLÊS POETRY IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE LITERATURE Part three PROFA. DRA. MARIA DO SOCORRO BAPTISTA BARBOSA JANUARY 2013 Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it 'the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.' The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of 'Artist.' Edgar Allan Poe TABLE OF CONTENTS UNIT II: The poetry of the USA ……………………………………………………….. 3 1. American Puritanism ………………………………………………………………. 3 Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor – Francis Murphy ……………………………. 3 The Puritan Literary Attitude – Kenneth B. Murdock ……………………………….. 4 1.1. Anne Bradstreet ………………………………………………………………….. 18 1.2. Edward Taylor ……………………………………………………………………. 20 2. Enlightenment in American Poetry ………………………………………………. 22 American Enlightenment Thought – Shane J. Ralston …………………………….. 22 2.1 Philip Freneau ……………………………………………………………………… 30 2.2 Phillis Wheatley ……………………………………………………………………. 33 3. American Romanticism and Transcendentalism ……………………………….. 35 American Romanticism – Maria do Socorro Baptista Barbosa .............................. 35 The American Transcendentalist Poets – Lawrence Buell ………………………… 38 3.1 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow …………………………………………………... 39 3.2 Ralph Waldo Emerson …………………………………………………………... 44 3.3 Edgar Allan Poe ………………………………………………………………….. 48 4. American Civil War ………………………………………………………………….. 52 The War between the States – American Experience ……………………………… 52 “To Light Us to Freedom and Glory Again”: The Role of Civil War Poetry – Library of Congress Poetry Resources ………………………………………………. 55 4.1 Ambrose Bierce ………………………………………………………………….. 56 4.2. William Cullen Bryant ……………………………………………………………. 58 4.3. Walt Whitman …………………………………………………………………….. 60 4.4. Emily Dickinson …………………………………………………………………... 63 References ……………………………………………………………………………… 67 3 UNIT II: The Poetry of the USA Poetry in the USA started long before the white colonists arrived in what is now the United States of America. However, because of lack of information about the natives’ oral traditions, this material begins with Puritan Tradition in Poetry, which is totally white centered. However, as we start to discuss other periods in American Literature, other ethnics are included, such as Africans, Native-Americans, Chicanos and Asian-Americans. It is always complicated to choose which writers to include and which ones we have to leave out. I hope you enjoy the ones included here. Good reading!! 1. American Puritanism Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor Francis Murphy LIKE most literate English people American Puritans took a great deal of pleasure in reading and writing poetry. They marked the course of history, gave thanks to public figures, learned their theology, examined their consciences, mourned the dead, honored their loved ones, celebrated the creation, and translated the Bible in a variety of poetic forms. Puritans of every occupation — schoolmasters, housewives, ship captains, and lawyers — tried their hands at making verse, although given the seventeenth-century preference for a literature that combined learning with wit it is not surprising that the educated clergyman, trained in Latin, Hebrew, and Greek, was more adept at it. In his often quoted guide to young ministers (Manuductio ad Ministerium, 1726) the learned Boston divine Cotton Mather shuddered at the thought of New England clergy reading the pagan Homer ("one of the greatest apostles the devil ever had in the world"); nevertheless he had to admit that Homer's example of an invocation uttered as a "preface unto all important enterprizes" could serve as a useful model for the seminary student, and that the Latin of Virgil, especially in his Georgics, "will furnish you with many things far from despicable." Though some have had a soul so unmusical, that they have decried all verse as being but a mere playing and fiddling upon words; all versifying as if it were a more unnatural thing than if we should choose dancing instead of walking, and rhyme as if 4 it were but a sort of moresco-dancing with bells, yet I cannot wish you a soul that shall be wholly unpoetical. -1- At the same time, and with serious consequences for the kind of poetry Harvard graduates would write, Mather cautioned that while making "a little recreation of poetry in the midst of your painful studies" was a good thing, the wise student will withhold his "throat from thirst" and beware the temptation to "be always pouring on the passionate and measured pages." Above all, he warned the student reading Ovid to take care not to be sensually aroused and find himself conversing with "muses" no better "than harlots." Mather concluded his essay with an appeal for calm in the current debate between the plain and learned style, arguing that Christian gentlemen indulge one another in matters of taste and, at the same time, letting his readers know that as far as he was concerned, the real "excellency of a book will never lie in the saying of little," nor will it be more valuable because it shuns "erudition." Mather's own rather clumsy efforts at verse (his best poem was written following the death of seven young ministers), reminds us that the passionate amateur, full of good intentions but not totally committed to his craft, does not produce lines that breathe. Some Harvard students were content to copy lines from Shakespeare and Herrick in their diaries, and it was probably just as well. Fortunately, two Puritan poets took their art more seriously: Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor. -2- The Puritan Literary Attitude Kenneth B. Murdock THERE is nothing in the religious literature of Puritan New England to match the richest pages of the great seventeenth-century Anglicans. It is a far cry from the poems of Herbert and Vaughan to the verses of Anne Bradstreet and the jog-trot measures of Michael Wigglesworth Day of Doom, or from the magnificence of Jeremy Taylor's prose or Donne's to the best that the colonists wrote. But this is not to say that that best had no merit. There are many flashes of poetry, many passages of eloquent prose, and, throughout, a style that rarely descends to mere tame mediocrity. The work of the best writers in colonial New England shows that they wanted to write well as one way of serving God, and reflects both their zeal and their concern for fundamental stylistic values. 5 The more this work is examined in the light of the handicaps the colonists faced and the standards they set for themselves, the more impressive it becomes. In seventy years they made Boston second only to London in the English-speaking world as a center for the publishing and marketing of books, and they produced a body of writing greater in quantity and quality than that of any other colonial community in modern history. Its merits may escape him who reads as he runs, but to the more patient it may offer fuller insight into the best qualities of the Puritan settlers and their eagerness to find an adequate literary creed for pious purposes. The study of it may encourage a valuable humility in the face of the problem of religious expression as it exists even in our own times. It is important first of all to realize that the American Puritan who wanted to be an artist in words — or, to put it more explicitly, who wanted to communicate his thoughts and emotion to others in such a way as to convince and move them-was faced by certain tangible handicaps. He was a colonist, and New England, compared to London, a wilderness. George Herbert in his quiet Wiltshire parish, John Donne in the deanery of St. Paul's, or Jeremy Taylor in the calm retirement of the Golden Grove, enjoyed advantages denied the pioneer Bostonian. They had within reach — at the most only a few days' journey away — the best libraries and the best intellectual society of which England could boast. Their place as scholars and artists was recognized; they could count on readers and hearers able to appreciate fully not only the substance of what they wrote but whatever literary skill they showed in it. They might be mystics or rationalists, high-church men or liberals, Calvinists or Arminians, and there were enough like-minded readers to welcome them. They might use the classics or the church fathers, experiment with all the devices of rhetoric, and seek out new images for their ideas, secure in the knowledge that learned readers trained in an artistic tradition would acclaim -89- their successes. But the New England colonist had no library to compare with those to be found in London; his audience, although eager, was limited in its tastes and inexperienced in literary niceties. If the colonial writer yearned for "good talk" or lively debates on literary problems he had to choose his companions from a very few, and some of those were sure to be separated from him by hours of travel on a difficult or dangerous road. He did read and he did write, but he could do so only as the exigencies of life in a pioneer community left him leisure. And even when Boston 6 grew to a town of comfortable size and colonial life became relatively easy, the learned man and — would-be artist was almost inevitably also a man whose political or religious duties engrossed much of his time. Anyone who can picture the hardships and practical complications they had to meet will be more inclined to wonder that Puritan writers wrote as much and as well as they did than to cavil at the fact that their work sometimes shows signs of crudity or haste. No great artist, however, has ever been made or marred by the purely material conditions under which he worked. Geniuses have flourished in attics and mere scribblers in great libraries. The Puritan writer had many concrete obstacles to surmount, but his stylistic practice and his successes and failures were determined not so much by the fact that the ink sometimes froze in his inkwell as he worked, or by anything else in his environment, as by the ideas he held and those he rejected.
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